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The Supreme, as the Absolute Good and not merely a good being
or thing, can contain nothing, since there is nothing that could
be its good.
Anything it could contain must be either good to it or not good;
but in the supremely and primally Good there can be nothing not
good; nor can the Absolute Good be a container to the Good:
containing, then, neither the good nor the not good it contains
nothing and, containing nothing, it is alone: it is void of all
but itself.
If the rest of being either is good- without being the absolute
good- or is not good, while on the other hand the Supreme
contains neither what is good nor what is not good, then,
containing nothing, it is The Good by that very absence of
content.
Thus we rob it of its very being as The Absolute Good if we
ascribe anything to it, existence or intellect or goodness. The
only way is to make every denial and no assertion, to feign no
quality or content there but to permit only the "It is" in which
we pretend to no affirmation of non-existent attribute: there is
an ignorant praise which, missing the true description, drags in
qualities beneath the real worth and so abases; philosophy must
guard against attaching to the Supreme what is later and lower:
moving above all that order, it is the cause and source of all
these, and is none of them.
For, once more, the nature of the Good is not such as to make it
all things or a thing among all: that would range it under the
same classification with them all and it would differ, thus, only
by its individual quality, some specialty, some addition. At once
it becomes not a unity but a duality; there is one common element
not good and another element that is good; but a combination so
made up of good and not good cannot be the purely good, the
primarily good; the primarily good must be that principle in
which the better element has more effectively participated and so
attained its goodness. Any good thing has become so by communion;
but that in which it has communion is not a thing among the
things of the all; therefore the Good is not a thing of the All.
Since there is this Good in any good thing- the specific
difference by which the combination becomes good- it must enter
from elsewhere than the world of things: that source must be a
Good absolute and isolated.
Thus is revealed to us the Primarily existent, the Good, above
all that has being, good unalloyed, containing nothing in itself,
utterly unmingling, all-transcending, cause of all.
Certainly neither Being nor Beauty springs from evil or from the
neutral; the maker, as the more consummate, must surpass the
made.
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